


Regret

by SukiTart



Category: BnHA, Boku no Hero Academia, My Hero Academia, mha
Genre: Angst, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Breakdown, Mild Blood, No Fluff, OOC Katsuki, One Shot, bakugo feels sorry for once, inko actually yells at bakugo, this was painful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:35:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25797514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SukiTart/pseuds/SukiTart
Summary: Katsuki Bakugo never apologized for anything. If he was aiming to be a hero, he had to do things with full certainty so he was sure of himself.But for once in his life, he had someone to be sorry for. And for once in his life, he didn't want to be a hero anymore.
Comments: 19
Kudos: 52





	Regret

Katsuki Bakugou never apologized for many things in his life.

He was always number one in everything, so he never had a reason to apologize for things that he did. Ever since he turned five years old and demonstrated the popping sparks of his quirk, he saw the world in vivid color. He grew up to think that he deserved the support he received at every whim, and whoever crossed him or thought otherwise would have to be forcibly stomped out under his feet. 

There were always people like that that he would encounter often. Other stupid kids on the playground that’d just roll their eyes and look the other way, or other dense teens in his middle school class that would carelessly poke fun at him and his ideals. But from a young age, there was someone who was always by his side, cheering him on. With freakishly colored green hair, dumb-looking freckles, and a coward-like personality that was annoying to him.

His name was Izuku Midoriya, but Katsuki always called him Deku to convey his uselessness. He always used to despise how weak he was, and constantly looked down on him for his lack of a quirk. That day when their quirks manifested in the middle of class and he found out that Izuku was quirkless, he didn’t hesitate to face the other way and consider him a hindrance to his goal of being the number one. He only saw him as a problem that he wanted gone, and on that fateful afternoon during middle school, he finally got that wish in the form of blood splattered across the pavement of his schoolyard that he could graphically recall to the present day.

He stopped calling him Deku from that moment on, but it didn’t really matter since he didn’t have any reason other than for the sake of memory to speak his name anymore.

Like a static radio, everything went numb. Everything felt cold, the sky turned gray, and the pride that he delicately built up everyday collapsed like a feather in the wind. The red in his irises reflected the color that was poured over the ground and over the frail body of the person that stuck by his side no matter what, and after a few long and grueling seconds, they grew shiny with unshed tears. Through all the screaming, through all the sirens, all the other voices he couldn’t discern, and despite the hands pulling him away by the arms from someone he realized he always cared about, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the lifeless and colorless gaze of Izuku’s. 

_He never wanted him to die._ He never wanted him to die, but why did he say that to him in the first place? Why did he hate him in the first place? Why did he feel so angry? Who was he angry at?

He couldn’t be angry at a dead body. So with each person his crimson eyes flitted over, he couldn’t place any form of resentment in any of them until he looked down at his own hands.

The cold feeling in him only grew until it bordered on freezing when he ran over to the home of Izuku and his mother to see how she was holding up after the news. He’d have to say that seeing her collapsed on the floor with puffy red eyes that showed signs that she had been crying for a while when he came in would be the second-worst sight he’s seen in his lifetime. The feeling amounted to how severe it was too when she immediately snapped at him once she realized, harshly banging her fists against his chest and yelling at the top of her lungs for what felt like hours until she couldn’t make another sound other than tired sniffles. Screaming about how it was his fault, and how it was because of him that Izuku wasn’t here anymore. How because of him, a mother didn’t have her son anymore. Inko Midoriya didn’t have her little baby Izuku anymore.

She was right, he realized. And it hurt him more than any training, villain, or hero could ever do so.

For once in his life from that moment, he felt shame. Raw, unadulterated, _shame_. Not only that, he felt a lot of other things that he was never familiar with before. Agony, regret, despair, and _pain_ were many things he couldn’t describe. The odd sensation of a thousand anchors dragging him down to the bottom of a dark void that quickly turned painful, almost unbearable. That feeling from when he saw the color crimson painted across concrete came back, and it stayed. He didn’t know what happened, but something seemed to take over him and he felt different. 

It was like a bullet had been shot through him and a thousand light switches flicked off to welcome the darkness of a large room he couldn’t find his way through. With that life-changing realization that he was a terrible person that should’ve been obvious for so many years, Katsuki could only manage to fall to his knees and hold her in a hug that she accepted as she spewed weak apologies for the next hour once she realized all the things she told him. He didn’t say anything back, but he wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to apologize. She was right to say all the things she said, and she was right to say that he was a terrible kid no matter how much each word stung. Because he was all of those things she described him to be.

With every problem presented, change is always in order to solve the problem. So he changed.

He wasn’t the same after he stepped outside the Midoriya household, and nothing ever looked as vibrant and saturated as it used to be when Izuku was still here. An unfixable crack ran over the goosebumps of his skin, washed out his soul until it was aggressively silenced, and split his heart into two clean halves. 

Throughout the rest of the school year at his junior high, he never lived the same as much as he himself wasn’t the same. He’d go to visit Inko Midoriya daily, making sure she was alright and tried to provide her as much as he could when Izuku couldn’t. While their relationship started off rocky for obvious reasons, they eventually came to bond under the same pain. He could even admit later on in the year that he was much closer to her than he was to his own mother, spending the night on the living room couch and staying awake by her side so she wouldn’t be alone through her tears.

One day during the summer, she walked into the living room where he was studying with a wobbly and weak smile that he could tell was healing, and he couldn’t believe his ears when he heard what she had told him on her way to the kitchen to make a meal for the both of them.

“Thank you for being here for _us_ all the time, Katsuki. You’re like a second son to me, and I’m sure if Izuku were here, he would have forgiven you.”

He tried to smile genuinely because he thought that was nice of her to think of him, but it only came out as mourning as hers was. He thought that she shouldn’t think of a monster as one of her own. He knew as well that Izuku would’ve forgiven him, but he wasn’t here to tell him that it was okay and that Katsuki himself could tell him that he was sorry.

The change was evident even to him after a while. At home, he was silent whenever his mother would demand him to do something, and he never raised his voice at anything no matter how much it agitated him on the inside. Instead of training like he normally would almost every hour of free time he had, he would numbly lay in bed until he couldn’t handle how loud his thoughts were. It continued as he blasted through the entrance exams of U.A., and he didn’t feel a single drop of pride course through his veins.

At school, it was the same way. He’d sit normally instead of raising his legs to prop them on the desk, and he never insulted anyone. People would give him a polite smile in class, and he always used to feel so enraged once he’d register that the happy expressions were directed towards him. The first thought that would always come to his normally active mind would always be the idea that they were mocking him, and he’d open his mouth to yell or snap something he’d never regret saying. But now, that thought would always be replaced with the image of a smile that had freckles dotted over each end, and he’d hesitate. Then he would clamp his mouth shut and keep going every time. 

When his class had been attacked by villains, when a purple-haired idiot and many other students taunted their classroom before the U.A. sports festival, or when he had won first place of the tournament without a word, he couldn’t feel a spark of life within him. Optimistic people like Eijiro Kirishima and Denki Kaminari would sidle up beside him during class and laugh about things he couldn’t find any humor in, he wouldn’t provide any input to the conversations nor would he laugh. They would always say that his quirk was cool, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel the same at all. He was lethargic in behavior, dragged his feet through the hallways, he always tried to sit alone during lunch but would be subdued by his classmates, and he always responded with silence no matter what they told or asked him.

They reminded him a lot of Izuku in some ways he couldn’t describe, so he tried to avoid them as much as he could. But that didn’t end up mattering when he sluggishly walked down to principal Nezu’s office a little bit into the school year and firmly tossed a resignation letter reluctantly signed by his mother on the desk. He wouldn’t have to ever see them again, nor did he have the guts to say goodbye, because he never said anything about transferring to a civilian high school. He never said anything about stepping down as a student from the most prestigious hero school in Japan because he had unwavering regrets plaguing him every night. They weren’t really friends with him because he never talked back anyway.

He didn’t want to be number one anymore.

How could he ever be a hero when the amount of strength he could muster in thousands of battles would never wash away a single piece of pain? He wasn’t fit to be a hero with the way he was and the things he did. He’s always been told that he had the power for a hero because heroes always win no matter what. But heroes would never laugh at someone to their face and tell them to jump off the school rooftop. Heroes would never look somebody in the eye, green eyes big and pure, and tell them to die. Heroes would never kill somebody, but he did just that.

However, the thought of Inko immediately washed away any resolve he had about quitting the whole hero gig altogether, and he paused for a moment after Nezu’s words of reasoning before silently taking it off his desk and shoving in into his hoodie on the way out. Every time he thought about abandoning the idea of being a pro hero, he always thought about the Midoriyas. Inko couldn’t get to see her son grow up to be the number one pro hero he’s always told her he wanted to be, and Izuku couldn’t live out his life just a little longer to be what he always wanted to be because of him, so he’d just have to carry on his dream for both mother and son. 

He was no Izuku Midoriya, and he didn’t have green hair or green eyes, but he’d damn well carry on the legacy he violently ended. He would be number one for the sake of Izuku.

Katsuki Bakugou never apologized for many things in his life. 

But he was so, so sorry.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I hope you enjoyed this piece of work, as it was an assignment within a group of friends to write an interaction between Bakugo and Izuku. While there isn't much of Izuku here, I tried to give it as much quality to the emotion as I could. I know that Katsuki would probably never act this way, but it's interesting to try and build off of the many ways he could react. I hope you liked this!


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